


Software, Hardware

by fireflystorm



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Crash Landing, Cyborgs, Exile, Fantasizing, Helmsman Sollux, M/M, Past Brainwashing, Prosthesis, Quadrant Confusion, Robots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 04:51:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/858002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflystorm/pseuds/fireflystorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Sollux Captor, and at the age of thirteen sweeps you had gone through training, reprogramming and employment into servitude of Her Imperiousness. That is, until a crash course led to your being crippled and only surviving thanks to an exiled engineer, whose name you don't know and have never heard. You have to adapt to being more robot than troll, and the awkward, strange feelings with begin to surface for the troll who salvaged your life but made your future bleak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Software, Hardware

   Everything is black. Your thoughts float like polaroids on a sea of pitch, fading in and out of existence. At first you can’t remember who you are and all you remember are two faces with one eye each staring at you before hands picked you up and carried you somewhere. And that’s what you remember, what you dream.

   Eventually, or maybe sooner (the chronology is messed for you, really), you remember what happened. Your name is Sollux Captor, and you’re of the ripe age of thirteen sweeps. Thirteen – an adult. One who had completed his training and dedication and employed into the noble line dedicated to his caste: a helmsman of the Imperious Army of the Empress. To live out the rest of your days as the driving force behind one of the most powerful ships in the fleet was an honor that a younger you had once sneered at. Training had taken that attitude from you.

   You think you wake up a couple of times. You’re not sure. Intermittent consciousness is practically indiscernible from unconsciousness. But you think you remember what happened. You remember the alarms sounding – first only at lowblood frequencies, then for all to hear. The lights of the ship flashed red and you opened your heterochromatic eyes, awoken from your intent focus. You glanced about, unmoving, still bound by the circuitry. Workmen running about from post to post. Frantic.

   “Crash course – too late to be averted, now,” you overheard a tealblood say to a navy companion, “Navigator’s bound for a culling.”

   “If anyone survives to make accusations,” the other replied solemnly, no longer bothering to tinker with the engine panel they’d been occupying themselves with.

   It suddenly occurred to you that you were going to die.

   You started struggling to free yourself from the wires. Wringing your body back and forth in the tyrian circuitry – circuitry, beloved circuitry, cursed circuitry! You were the power source. And what could you do, have done? The captain goes down with the ship and the helmsman does, too. The engine will die, too. The escape pods, if there were any, would be loaded with the highest castes on the ship; no one thought twice about measly, abundant, replaceable rustbloods.

   The lights all flashed red. The alarms got louder. You struggled harder and harder, jerking your torso back and forth. If you could have just gotten a little give, you thought… You started to scream and spark and crackle, firing optic blasts which bounced harmlessly off the reinforced engine metal. A computerized voice announced calmly, “Approaching path obstruction”.

   The last thing you remember is the sound of metal twisting, breaking, burning. The engine room was abandoned. No one was there to hear you scream as the wiring, sealed tight to hold your arms and legs separately, started to pull in opposite directions. Ripping you, tearing you. You screamed; you screamed till your lungs refused to let out any more precious air and you could feel honey-colored blood spilling out over flesh and circuits. And then nothing. Nothing at all.

   You know you aren’t dead yet. But you’re also not entirely sure you’re alive.

 

 

   You’re awake. You know you’re awake because your thoughts make sense. Your brain is making Alternian words which form glorious sentences and your head feels fuzzy and groggy but you are conscious and probably sane. The thing which made you doubt this conclusion is, of course, the darkness. You can feel that your eyelids are open. You blink once to make sure.

   Your whole body feels numb and you can tell it’d be impossible to lift your arms to check for damage on the rest of you.

   You struggle working your mouth muscles for a moment. It was hard enough in the beginning to talk around your fangs, but now every part of you feels swollen and it doesn’t make it any easier. After some struggle, you manage to say, “Hello?” You marvel at your almost nonexistent voice and then the fact that it echoes off metal nearby. It would be just your luck, you think, if you had survived exsanguination and debris and all only to be lying still in the wreckage of an Imperious warship, left to starve to death.

   You keep trying at your muscles. Starting small, with your fingers – just a slight curl of each. You have no luck with your right arm so you do your left. Everything is intact, you think. Each finger you eventually manage to curl into your palm and then back out, and you feel like a million boondollars because of your progress. It’s not much – you may be doomed – but you’re still fucking awesome.

   After what feels like ten minutes or so of trying to get your body to respond to your brain, you hear a noise. A door sliding open – the distinct, smooth sliding sound of a modern Alternian door, followed by a deep voice.

   “Hm.. your eyes are open…?”

   You put a ridiculous amount of effort into raising your left forearm just slightly, as if to wave. You’re alive, and you’re not starving to death in a mutilated pile of metal, so you add that to your list of things to not be pissed off about. Of course, the pessimist in you reminds you that you’re probably also so desperate for help that you’re hallucinating.

   “Oh, goodness, I– don’t move. Stay still. That’s an order.”

   You can hear the haughtiness in his voice – intense pride in either his job, caste, or both. Maybe a military troll. You don’t really care – he’ll condescend on you even if you tell him you serve Her Imperiousness as your caste always has, and till the death. Well, served, anyway. You hope he’s a qualified docterrorist so he can just fix you up and get you back on your way in no time flat.

   You realize with sudden disdain that you actually are staying still. “Where…?” Where. You want to facepalm at your own stupidity – of all the questions you could ask, ‘where’ is the first word to fall out of your mouth. For a brilliant hacker you could occasionally be a total fuckface.

   “Quiet, yellowblood.” It’s not an insult, exactly, but it does indicate his placing importance on caste. Probably an upper green or mid blue, you think with disdain. Low enough to hate caste, high enough to be overtly proud. Interrupting your thoughts, he begins to speak again in his smooth, deep voice, and you can tell he’s leaning over you.

   “Your ship crashed into this planet – you’re still in the Alternian Empire. I checked the rubble for survivors.” A momentary pause. “You were the only one.”

   Some part of you is excited about that – saying in a lisp with a sneer, ‘serves them right’. And the other part of you calls that part a douchebag. At the forefront of your consciousness you give it no heed. You survived only to power another ship at some point, when you’re fixed.

   “Sorry for your eyes. I haven’t been able to fix anything. I was waiting for your condition to become sta… for you to be in better condition. I’ll begin on you as soon as you’d like.”

   Slowly, you ask, “What first?” You slip on the ‘s’. Your lisp is worse now than it was at five when your fang sets were too big for your mouth.

   “I’ll replace your eyes. You damaged them beyond repair with ocular blasts, I believe … psionic.”

   “Then.. now,” you tell him. You can feel a big hand on your arm and then a tiny prick like a bloodbug, and then you’re slipping into comfortable, dark oblivion.

 

 

   When you wake up this time, you’re more lucid than ever. You open your eyelids and see the light. Literally, that is – you see the fluorescent fixture hanging above you, and small bugbeasts which continually fly into it and stupidly bounce off, and you are every kind of delighted. Without a thought, you reach up to rub your new eyes with your left hand, clearing out the gunk. And then you have the awed realization that you are using your motherfucking hand, thank Her Imperiousness.

   You hold your hand in front of your face for a minute. Your eyes are better than they ever were before – this docterrorist knows his stuff. you can make out every detail of your hand, down to the tiny translucent hairs on the back to each ridge on your nails. You pull your other hand up to investigate that as well.

   Your stomach drops. You don’t have another hand.

   You stare at the hard white bandaging with its yellow stains from your blood. You can see the uneven spot where the bones of your forearm must be sticking out. It makes you sick – you’ll never code again, much less use a computer at all. But that doesn’t matter, you remind yourself. You don’t need a hand to provide for a ship’s psionic capacitors.

   You pull yourself up using your hand on the edge of the table and fall back down onto the cold metal when you see your lower half. Your nonexistent lower half.

   Your legs are gone. You think maybe you still have your pelvis, but there’s no way of knowing because you’re not willing to look back again knowing you’re only half a troll. Half, sans a hand. Why should you be alive at all? No quadrantmates to speak of, only surviving as long as you had because no one cared whether an engine filled filial pails. As far as the Empire is concerned you are now useless – no genetic material, Empress knows if you have any psionic abilities left. You’re useless. You should have died.

   You sit there staring upward for a long time, feeling sorry for yourself. Eventually you bore and glance about your surroundings. Despite the dismal lighting everywhere but upon you, you can still see every detail crisply, and you might thank the good docterrorist if you weren’t in such a dark mood. Of course, it’s about that time you realize you’re not in a hospital at all.

   You’re in a square, metal room, dimly lit. There’s scrap metal everywhere and a large workbench littered with scraps and bolts and wires. There’s a picture of an olive troll making a diamod with her fingers, and in the corners of the room several full robotic trolls – different models, some visibly older. The newest one is so realistic it could be a real troll if not for the shine of the metal.

   You look back to the olive troll and her sweet smile. Precious moirallegiance. Your left middle finger instinctively twitches, missing the moirail ring it used to bear. But tools of the empire don’t get to wish for such things any more.

 

 

   When the door opens and your not-a-doctor returns, you push his hand away with your good hand. He’s not quite what you imagined him to look like. He is huge, and rather than being straight set with pride his broad shoulders slump. His eyes are invisible behind dark shades and his hair is a thick black curtain hanging down to his midriff. One horn is an arrow pointing to the ceiling and the other broken short. When he speaks, his teeth are broken in places.

   “What exactly are you doing?” He asks, removing his hand. Obviously it’s for politeness – his arms are thick and muscular, hands huge, and yours spindly and small.

   “Don’t fix me,” you tell him. Now that you’re more lucid, less numb, your lisp is less pronounced, and you can add staccato venom to your words. He waits for you to go on, and you oblige. “I’m worthless now. You should’ve just left me to fucking die. I can’t walk. I can’t use a computer. I’ve got nothing.”

   He looks at you for a long moment, then steps away. He ties his hair into a ponytail and sets his shades on the workbench, then looks back at you. Somehow his deep navy eyes are a mix of tired and stern, and your blood boils because he looks like a lusus tired of his charge’s bullshit.

   “I saved you, and I’ll be darned if I don’t finish what I’ve started.”

   Fine. You’ll give this lusus a temper tantrum. You try out a psionic charge and manage to zap his hand with little sparks. Once, then again, and you get this sort of excited pleasure from the way he jumps back and gets an angry look on his face when he examines the holes you burned in his glove. You give him a sneer and he presses down his heavy hands on your upper arms, holding you against the metal of the table.

   “Hold still. I command you,” he says. You spit in his face.

   You see the slight blue tinge as his face flushes and he grits his teeth, snarling at you. His blood must be boiling, you think – and literally, considering the way he starts to sweat. He moves and grabs a towel, and you pull yourself up to see if there are any tools nearby you can use. You don’t know what you’re doing or why.

   Before you know it, he’s pushing you forcefully back down on the table and you can tell he’s still holding back almost all his strength and that makes him sweat with the self-control, and then you see the straps in his other hand and there’s no way to keep him from strapping you so tight to the table that even the thought of moving is obnoxiously impossible.

   “Fine, asshole,” you tell him, struggling uselessly for about one whole second before giving up, “you’re really going to bother saving someone who doesn’t want to be saved?” He doesn’t say anything. “Well, when I’m back in fighting shape I’ll just beat the shit out of you, and blow up all the machinery on the planet while I’m at it–“

   He puts duct tape on your mouth.

 

 

   There is nothing in any universe that is worse than surgery without anesthetic, you decide. You have a lot of time to think that over and over as that exact thing occurs. After he duct-tapes your mouth, he starts cutting off the bandages where your torso ends. He gets a scalpel, and gets to work.

   You can’t scream for the duct tape, and you’re starting to regret saying anything rude to this guy when the other part of your subconscious reminds you, fuck that, and fuck him for doing this, and fuck him for helping you. You have no idea, suddenly, if you’d rather be dead or going back to the Empire, and you decide that both have their benefits. At least you knew what was going to happen every day when you were a helmsman.

   Then again, that’s what you thought before the crash, too.

   You’re having a hundred thousand different thoughts at once and you always thought multitasking was your forte but suddenly you just wish everyone would shut the fuck up inside your head. You hear voices that are your own and voices that are the soon-to-be-dead and voices from the past. You think that when your cruel savior is done fucking with you you’re going to grab that goddamned scalpel or knife or anything sharp in reasonable distance and stab him in the bulge and see how he likes it.

   And suddenly that thought is lodged in your brain, and then it goes a little further. You think about holding the blade at his throat as he does that little snarl again, and then running it down and leaving blue-black streaks of blood and cutting off that shirt and running your sharp nails down his chest and biting his lips and suddenly your mind has run away with you.

   You’re half-disgusted with yourself. Only half, because the other half is screaming spades because it hates him as much as you hate yourself, and really hates him for saving you. Did he just save you to fuck with you, to make you his experiment? Fuck him. You fire off sparks again, and you can’t really manage much more than that. You can’t hardly even reach him. And you can’t even curse at him or yourself because of the duct tape.

   Everything you’re thinking is totally silenced when the blueblood is fucking with the split nerve ends in your thighs and you’re screaming against the tape and arching your back as much as is physically possible under restraint and without any real control over the lower back.

   Oh, you’re going to fucking bite his tongue out. You’re going to pull him to your height by the horn and you’re going to … you’re going to fucking snog him.

   Maybe you’re waxing a little black.

 

 

   At some point, you suppose you passed out. You’re thankful for that, really, but you’re not sure the pain could have gotten a whole lot worse than it already was. Except for the actual experience of being ripped apart, maybe, but you really don’t want to think of that. And your sleep without sopor is miserable – riddled with nightmares combined with awkward fantasies in the mix.

   You pull yourself up with your good hand to see his progress, in any case. Your restraints are unbuckled, thankfully. Where your legs once connected, you see metal replacing your pelvis with two plates attached where your legs would, two wires sticking out the middle of either one, and small square holes where the wires emerge. Twos. You could appreciate that, at least.

   You stare for a long time at those, and then pull up the black fabric of the shirt you’re wearing. You marvel a little at the way your gray skin seamlessly meets the metal, and they’re almost the same tone, too. Prosthetics. You drop the shirt back down and then it occurs to you it’s not your shirt, and you pull it in front of your face to examine it. The symbol is blue and it’s a diagonal arrow, crossed in the center by a short line. It must be _his_ , you realize.

   You’re sort of starting to wish you knew his name, at least. If only to curse at him properly.

   Eventually the door slides open with that familiar sound, and you look over at him. He stands momentarily in the doorway, holding a slightly tapered, gray cylinder in his hand, meeting your eyes behind the shades.

   He walks over to you and kneels next to the table without a word. He places the cylinder up to your new pelvis and checks the size against the plates. Still sitting up, you watch him. It’s your new thigh. It looks real, the right color and all, but still with that slight metallic shine. There’s another on the workbench.

   “What’s your name?” You ask him finally as he takes off the plates to reveal circuitry. Glorious circuitry, inside you.

   He doesn’t bother looking up to hold the conversation, removing the top of the cylinder to reveal the intricate wiring inside there, as well. It’s kind of beautiful to you, but that’s how you’ve always seen things like that. Complexity and intricacy. You want to hate him more for knowing how to do that at all, but your mind answers that black fantasizing continually is ridiculous.

   “Equius Zahhak,” he answers. You notice the moirail ring on his finger, but that’s all. How do hands as big as his deal with wires like those, you wonder.

   “Sollux Captor,” you answer automatically in return, still watching him. Your fantastic eyes can even make out pores on the artificial thigh as he connects it. You feel little sparks of pain as the wires connect and join, binding themselves together.

   You still kind of want to hate him. You vaguely cling to that emotion, but it’s useless, because you’re kind of excited about the prospect of walking again, of being a full troll. Maybe you could go make a new life for yourself on a planet at the edge of the Empire and stay under the radar. But quadrantmates would be required, and…

   “Hey,” you start. “I have a question.”

   “Shoot,” Equius answers.

   “Where exactly are we in the Empire? Which way is Alternia from here?”

   “I don’t know,” he confesses. It doesn’t sound impatient or upset in any regard. Just sort of defeated. “I was exiled here for association with a terrorist. The bad kind,” he adds.

   You go silent as he attaches a second thigh in the same way. Then, your curiosity gets the best of you. “A terrorist? You were acting against the Empire, but you saved a helmsman?” You almost scoff.

   “Not me,” he answers, shaking his head as he picks up what you presume are kneecaps. “My moirail.”

   “Her?” You ask, looking over at the little olive troll in the picture. Her smile doesn’t exactly scream ‘terrorist’, but you can’t judge a movie by its poster, you guess. You’re pretty sure that’s how the saying goes.

   “Yes,” he answers, following your eyes, then going back to install your calves. With each piece he checks the rotation and the movement. He still never bothers looking up at you. “She was siphoning information through a legislacerator mole to work her way into the Empire. She was working with a group which had the intent to steal documents recounting a past revolution. I think, perhaps, just for the thrill.”

   You watch him attach feet that are incredibly realistic, even despite the seams where you can see the toes attach. When they’re both attached, he reaches up and messes with the wiring at the top of the legs, and you feel a few sparks of pain before you suddenly feel the legs as if they were your own.

   “Move them,” he says.

   You do. You lift them and flex them and bend your knees and move each of your toes individually.

   “Wow,” you murmur, reaching down to touch the metal of your new thighs. It’s warm from Equius’s hot-blooded touch. “How did you learn this shit?”

   “Please refrain from using such _lewd_ language, Mr. Captor,” he answers, bringing himself to his feet. “I simply have time to practice. I will leave you to your own devices for now.”

   Equius heads for the door, presses the button, and leaves you alone in the workshop.

   You slide to the edge of the table and place your feet on the floor. You can feel the floor under you; though you have no concept of temperature, you can feel, and that’s incredible. You push yourself off with your good hand and you’re standing. You don’t even wobble. Your legs feel a little strange, like when you get out of a recuperacoon and stand up covered in slime and tired, but when you walk it’s with ease. As if they’ve been your legs for your whole life.

   You walk over to the door and hit the button for it to open, then walk into the hallway. You are going to find some fucking sopor and get some decent sleep if it ends up actually killing you. You don’t know where Equius is, but after checking two doors you find what you surmise is his respite block, complete with recuperacoon.

   Without taking your shirt off, you pull yourself up – rather easily, thanks to robotic legs – and slosh into the sopor. In a few seconds, you're out like a light.

**Author's Note:**

> Really, this was supposed to be a one-shot but the length got a bit out of hand, so I'm dividing it into what should be two chapters. This first chapter is kind of "as feelings emerge" and really setting up the romance of the next chapter.


End file.
